"Snapshots scattered in a drawer — the autumn wind
"In the relentless, ever-changing experience of moment after moment, we take snapshots. They are attempts to hold outside time's flow certain captured moments of one's life. Here they are set against the autumn wind, which blows hard already, and will lead to the even stronger winds of winter.
"We've set the snapshots aside, put them in a drawer. We try to hold on to these photographed episodes in our lives, to preserve them. When we look at images of ourselves, of others, of places, we remember now how we imagine it was then. Was it a happy time or a sad one, a time of promise or of resignation? 'That was me,' we say. 'That's the way I was then.' But is it true?
"While we sit looking at these snapshots, we can feel the autumn wind, hear it. Nature won't let us stop life, capture it, hide it away. When we hear the wind whistling through the shutters, we're learning from Nature that our plan to record and preserve things is a fantasy, a waking dream.
"What it tells us is that we have to let go of the 'me' we've made an elaborate mental catalog of — the imagined character in that story we take to be permanent, independent, real. As our meditations deepen, and increasingly we find that so much that we’d thought was real can be abandoned, our hearts become more open to ourselves and to all around us. How little we actually need, how much we can give without any effort, how much easier life is than we had thought."
